Hasta La Ideas

Best of HDW takes a closer look at some of the most exciting projects featured in Design Museum Holon’s “Designers Plus Ten” exhibition.

The “Local Souvenirs” designed by Johnathan Hopp in collaboration with Sarah Auslander are some of Israel’s most recognizable and widely sold design objects. The glazed earthenware replicas of important Israeli buildings include many of Tel Aviv’s famous Bauhaus beauties, like the one at 28 Rosh Pina Street, designed by architect Arieh Cohen in 1935 (below).

Before Johnathan set up his studio in Yafo, where he both designs and produces his ceramic projects, he studied Industrial Design at RISD and interned at Marcel Wanders’ studio in Amsterdam. His process, which has evolved significantly over the last decade, usually begins with “photographs and manipulations of photographs.”

I then make some paper mock-ups and models until I feel confident enough to make a plaster, wood or plasticine model for casting. Occasionally, I have a craftsman make the model or the piece for me when I don’t have the equipment or the skills necessary for the job. The model is then duplicated in a RTV silicone material and plaster molds are made of the silicone part. Ceramic slip is cast into the mold, then glaze is applied and sometimes ceramic decals are used on the glaze.

Right now Johnathan says he’s interested in “the ‘Properness’ of design objects. As opposed to art, which is allowed—indeed expected—to be rude, ugly and inappropriate, design is expected to be sweet, pretty, polite and tasteful. In my work I enjoy prodding these boundaries and challenging these expectations.” Certainly, his Local Souvenirs are very sweet, so perhaps he’ll explore the rude, ugly and inappropriate next for a change of pace.

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Best of HDW takes a closer look at some of the most exciting projects featured in Design Museum Holon’s “Designers Plus Ten” exhibition.

Adital Ela founded her studio, S-Sense Design, after getting her Master’s in Sustainable Design from Design Academy Eindhoven. She was a 2010 TED Fellow and consults the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor in sustainability—none of which she told the design panel when she made her presentation during Holon Design Week.

Instead she focused on her work, like “WindyLight,” a street light that’s powered with wind energy. Each “WindyLight” looks like a cluster of pinwheels made of LED lights that can be illuminated with even very small gusts of wind. She also made “Waterfull,” a water collector and filter than operates on a completely passive system.

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During Holon Design Week dozens of promising young designers made presentations to a panel of design week directors and global design leaders. We saw everything from jewelry, fashion, product, housewares, furniture and brand new materials. See five of the ten best designers emerging in Israel’s growing design community below, and be sure to check out the other five in Part One.

1. Lena Dubinsky
A gifted ceramicist and a Red Dot Design winner, Lena has a broad portfolio that includes a set of ceramic irrigation tiles as well as a collection of tools that pays homage to ancient measuring devices. She also might have been the only designer I met at Design Week who wasn’t interested in producing a large run of her work or even selling it at all. When I asked her if she had a sales plan for a line of porcelain rings she had just made, each a unique, miniature sculpture crafted by hand, she told me she didn’t feel right selling them, that it would be more honest to give them away to people to ensure they found a good home.

2. Lital Mendel
I saw several designers use materials in a surprising way, but none so surprising as Lital’s jewelry made from vacuum-formed PVC wrapped stones. Her ‘plastic-wrapped’ pieces are a result of a search for a replacement for diamonds. No, there is simply no replacement for diamonds, but her clear, shiny gem stones might be a start. I like her Folded collection best. Each piece is made entirely from a single piece of intricately folded paper.

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Last year Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, held its very first design week. Sponsored and organized by the government, it’s been described to me as an underwhelming affair. This year, however, Design Museum Holon has stepped in to host what might (and indeed what ought to) go down in history as the city’s first true Design Week.

The museum opened its doors only two years ago, but its been in the works for almost a decade as part of a citywide initiative to transform Holon into a hub for art, design and culture. In 2003 Ron Arad was invited by Mayor Moti Sasson and Managing Director Hana Hertsman to set the international standard with his sculptural Cor-Ten Steel banded beauty (above). The design school Holon Institute of Technology, which lies just across the street, was established over forty years ago, but Design Museum Holon is the first design museum in all of Israel, making it an obvious choice as the center of all the Design Week activities.

Unlike other design weeks that focus their efforts on a main exhibition hall filled with designer’s booths and a program of talks and lectures, Design Museum Holon’s Director, Alon Sapan and Galit Gaon, the Chief Curator, invited nineteen design week directors and design leaders from all over the world for what I think can be best described as design summer camp.

Every morning, after sharing a typical Israeli breakfast, the impressive lineup from Tokyo, Sofia, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Lodz, Budapest and Belgrade were picked up from their hotel in downtown Tel Aviv and bused to Holon. There, we split up into three groups and spent the day together listening to a stream of presentations made by aspiring Israeli designers. Each designer was given seven minutes to take us through a slideshow of their work, after which it was opened up to questions and feedback.

Sure, these designers could each have taken a booth in a large exhibition hall and we could have strolled by them, stopping only to look at the things that caught our eye, but for a country that readily admits to a lack of design history, what better way to introduce the world to its very active design present than to immerse us in personal conversations with local designers? We not only gained deeper understanding of what Israeli designers have to offer, but we got an up-close-and-personal insight into the reality of what it means to design in Israel today.

I, for one, noticed a surprising lack of furniture, architecture and other large scale projects, as well very little graphic or typographic design. The overwhelming majority of what we saw focused on small goods – jewelry, home and office products and gift items. When I walked around Tel Aviv I saw a similar aesthetic – plenty of jewelry shops, no furniture stores and only one object-centered design store, called Soho.

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This is the first year Design Museum Holon has hosted the city’s Design Week, a three-day event held mainly at the museum itself, the Ron Arad stunner that lies a short twenty minute drive south of Tel Aviv. While every city does design week a little differently, Holon’s puts a special emphasis on bringing twenty of the world’s design week directors and cultural ambassadors to spend time with one another in an intimate setting, and to meet one-on-one with emerging Israeli designers in a series of panels.

On day one we spent the entire morning and afternoon split up into three groups that saw presentations from a diverse body of young talent, from fashion to graphic design to product and furniture. There were several standouts, whom you’ll meet in the coming days, as well as several that raised questions in a larger discussion about the role of design education, what it means to design in a country that lacks a design history and how IKEA just might be paving the way for good design here in Israel.

On day two we’ll meet more up-and-coming Israeli designers, including the 42 featured in the museum’s new exhibition “Designers Plus Ten,” which surveys the work of a juried group of designers who completed their degrees ten years ago, at the dawn of two important local events—the country’s first IKEA and the arrival 10-year anniversary of Google Images in Hebrew.

Stay tuned for more.

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